Filmmaker Alex Gibney’s Musk is said to offer an unflattering portrait of the Tesla boss – so much so that Universal is said to be thinking again about releasing it. Having made such films as Going Clear, We Steal Secrets and Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, Alex Gibney has a track record of ... Musk | Report casts doubt as to whether Universal will release Alex Gibney’s documentary
Filmmaker Alex Gibney’s Musk is said to offer an unflattering portrait of the Tesla boss – so much so that Universal is said to be thinking again about releasing it.
Having made such films as Going Clear, We Steal Secrets and Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, Alex Gibney has a track record of making documentaries that hold the powerful to account.
There may be signs that his latest film, the 225 minute-long Musk, may be a little too unflattering for comfort however. About Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire figure behind Tesla, SpaceX and whatever the hell X is these days, the documentary was well received when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in early September.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, however, Universal Pictures – which has the rights to distribute Musk in territories outside the US – is nervous about releasing it at all. Universal had previously acquired those rights in 2023; indie studio Bleecker Street, meanwhile, is handling Musk’s cinema release in the US, where it’ll emerge on the 16th October.
There isn’t a release date for Musk outside the US as yet, and there’s said to be a reason for that, according to THR’s sources. A final decision has yet to be made about its worldwide release, supposedly because it’s “now politically sensitive for parts of the Trump administration.”
There’s even the possibility that the rights could be returned to the film’s producers.
Although Elon Musk isn’t interviewed in the documentary, numerous people in his orbit are, and the film is said to be highly critical of an industrialist who’s used his social media platforms to boost far-right opinions and whose brutal cuts to US government spending (through the Trump-approved DOGE program) are likely to cause ripple effects for years to come.
The documentary’s contents have clearly hit a nerve with its subject, as Musk took to his X (formerly Twitter) platform to describe Gibney as a “bitter old man” and the film itself as “boring af”.
It remains to be clear whether THR’s report is accurate, or what Universal will decide to do with Musk.
At present, it sounds like a similar scenario to the one that faced Artificial a few months ago. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, the feature film is said to offer another unflattering account of an unfeasibly rich tech guy – in this case, OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
Amazon MGM, which had previously bankrolled several other Guadagnino films, suddenly dropped Artificial in June. Amazon, which has a multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI, said “Artificial would be better served if it were released by a different studio.”
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Indie company Neon later picked up the film, and it’s now due for release in US cinemas on the 25th December.
That incident certainly appeared to highlight the problem with Hollywood’s ever-shrinking pool of studios, all of them owned by huge corporations who’d rather not bankroll stories that criticise the billionaire class.
Musk is screening at the London Film Festival on the 9th and 10th October. For now, it’s the only opportunity for UK film-goers to see it in a cinema.
Image credit: Brian Sollis. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.
